Donald Trump wants to ‘try and get to heaven’ — just like Bob Dylan
The president seems to think his soul is on the line with a Ukraine-Russia ceasefire
Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
By PJ Grisar August 19, 2025
Donald Trump, U.S. president and credited author of Art of the Deal, is transactional — so naturally when it comes to ending the yearslong war between Russia and Ukraine, he thought “what’s in it for me?”
In a Tuesday call in to Fox & Friends, Trump said, “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” adding that he believes he is “at the bottom of the totem pole,” but if he earns a place in the great hereafter, brokering the peace will be “one of the reasons.”
Trump’s in good company striving for the pearly gates, as attested to in a 1997 track on Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.”
While Trump’s musical tastes seem to circle the Village People, Broadway standards and apparently soon-to-be Kennedy Center honorees Gloria Gaynor and KISS, it’s not impossible Dylan’s track, about a spurned lover clawing at sanctuary, may resonate with him.
The lyrics describe a man’s effort “to get to heaven before they close the door” (had he tried knocking?).
Blessed are the peacemakers, and Trump, still considered a longshot for a Nobel prize despite the endorsement of the leaders of Israel, Rwanda, Gabon, Azerbaijan and Cambodia, clearly believes he’s in need of blessing. He did not elaborate on what he believes he did to earn damnation.
But there’s ample reason to believe he’d identify with the plaintive speaker in Dylan’s song, who sings “When you think that you lost everything/You find out you can always lose a little more.”
While Trump has never admitted to losing the 2020 election, he is reported to have told his daughter Ivanka, during one of his bankruptcies, that an unhoused man they saw on Fifth Avenue had “$8 billion more than me.”
Unlucky at times in love, Trump can empathize with the romantic balladeer, even if the heaven he speaks of seems more metaphorical.
The existential tone is new for President Trump, who has a habit of trumpeting his good health and mental acuity. Perhaps South Park’s recent rendering of him in bed with Satan got him worried a reckoning was coming.
Or maybe it’s seasonal. The month of Elul begins this week, beginning the cycle where the Jewish faithful take stock of what they may atone for, hoping they’ll be inscribed in the Book of Life opened on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur. (As Dylan, wrote in the song “you can seal up the book and not write anymore.”)
Trump may be dimly aware of the high holidays, given his Jewish daughter in-laws. But it’s universal and understandable to fear our trespasses, in romance or leadership, may end us in the Bad Place. But perhaps not so understandable as Trump’s distress at being kept out of an exclusive gated community — one that, in most cartoon renderings, if not Dylan’s rugged songsmithing, is gilded just the way he likes it.
